Confederation Bridge

20Sep

The Confederation Bridge is a long frickin bridge that links New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. It’s 12.9 kilometres long. It opened in 1997. That’s hard to believe because I remember learning about the building of the bridge in school.

The bridge is so long that it takes more than 10 minutes to cross it. You know how in old cartoons they reuse the background if a character is walking, running or driving somewhere? The Flintstones is what comes to mind. Driving along the Confederation Bridge felt like that. You can’t see much over the concrete barriers and there are light posts every couple feet and then you would see a fat, angry seagull glaring at you. It looked as though it was in the same position, every time you saw it. So I felt as though the animators or my life got a little lazy and decided to repeat the background so they could focus on more important things. Like allowing me to not plunge to my death off the size of a frickin long bridge.

You have to pay a toll to cross the bridge, when you leave PEI. 12 years ago, my family and I went for a trip to Nova Scotia and PEI to visit family. This was when the bridge was but 2 years old. My mother remembers the toll being about $22 way back then and the toll has literally doubled in price in that time.

Wikipedia tells me that discussions for building something across the Northumberland Strait began way back in the 1870s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that they finally came to a … concrete solution. Get it? Because the bridge is made of concrete? …sorry.